marc wilhelm | game maker

What Passion Gets You

As Steve Jobs says in this video, passion is fundamental to fuel the perseverance necessary to succeed in a worthwhile endeavor. The daily drudgery of life, pitfalls and self-hating dream killers willing to come at you are certainly aplenty.

Real passion has a wonderful side affect. It can make an unexpected success out of even a minor work, sometimes resulting in a near-masterpiece.

Edmund McMillen made Binding of Isaac as a side project, because he LOVES to make games and needed a minor 3 month project to fill in a gap between major ones.

Well BOI is a really good game. It has received a metacritic rating of 84.8 and sold around half a million copies in just 4 months despite being available exclusively on Steam. Also, not bad for an indie side project filled with what some consider to be questionable religious content.

I bought it on release day and introduced it to my wife. After a few weeks of vigilant play she declared it to be her favorite game of all time! She's not your typical gamer but she’s played enough to know the good from the bad and through me has been exposed to many other indie games. She loves the roguelike qualities, the theme and especially the expansion content of BOI. Is it a masterpiece? To fans like my wife, it is!

Just goes to show that even something intended to be a minor work can be great if the passion is there.